Session 2 – Azure Logic Apps – Advanced integration patterns

This was one of the most expected sessions on Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017 with Jeff Hollan (Sir Hollywood) and Derek Li talking about “Advanced integration patterns”. The agenda of the session included talks on –

Logic Apps Architecture

Parallel Actions

Exception Handling

Other “Operation Options”

Workflow Expressions

The Logic Apps architecture under the hood looks as follows –

An important point to observe is that the ForEach loop in Logic Apps runs the tasks in parallel!

Awesome overview from @jeffhollan @logicappsio on how #LogicApps are executed by the runtime. No thread management needed!!

The Logic Apps designer is basically a TypeScript/React app that uses OpenAPI (Swagger) to render input and output. The Logic Apps designer has the capability to generate Workflow definition (JSON). You can configure the runAfter options via the Logic Apps designer.

This statistic made by Jeff Hollan was probably the highlight of the show

In the history of #LogicApps, there hasn’t been a single run that hasn’t executed at least once.

After a very interesting demo by Derek Li, Jeff Hollan started his talk on Workflow Expressions. An expression is anything but any input that will be dynamic (changes at every run). Jeff explained the different expression properties in a easy to understand way –

@ – Used to indicate an expression. It can be escaped with @@. Example – @foo()

Jon Fancey moved into the concept of Integration Account (IA) and made the mention about the VETER pipeline being available as a template in Azure Logic Apps using Integration Account.

Integration Account is the core to XML and B2B capabilities

IA provides partner creation and management

IA provides for XML validation, mapping, and flat file conversion

Provides tracking

Jon listed the Logic Apps enhancements coming soon for working with XML such as:

XML parameters

Code and functoids

Enhancements soon

Transform output format (XML, HTML, Text)

BOM handling

Jon showed a very interesting demo about how to transform an XML message with C# and XSLT in Logic Apps. You got to wait a little longer till the videos are made available on the INTEGRATE 2017 event website 🙂

Disaster Recovery with B2B, and how it works?

In the final section of his presentation, Jon discussed the Monitoring and tracking of Azure Logic Apps. This part was covered by Srinivasa Mahendrakar on one of his recent Integration Monday sessions.

Jon showed an early preview (mockup) of the OMS Dashboard for Azure Logic Apps that’s coming up soon. With this, you can perform Operational Monitoring for Logic Apps in OMS with a powerful query engine. You can expect this feature to be rolled out mid-July!

With that, completed the first set of sessions for the morning on Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017.

Once again, but unfortunately for the last time on stage, it was time for Sir Hollywood Jeff Hollan to rock the stage with his partner Kevin Lam to talk about bringing Logic Apps into DevOps with Visual Studio and monitoring.

The key highlights from the session include –

Visual Studio tooling to manage Logic Apps

Hosted the Logic App Designer within Visual Studio

Resource Group Project (same project that manages the ARM projects)

Cloud Explorer integration

XML/B2B artifacts

Make sure you have selected “Cloud Explorer for Visual Studio 2015 and Azure Logic Apps Tools for Visual Studio” these tools in order to be able to use Logic Apps from Visual Studio. It also works on Visual Studio version 2015/2017.

Kevin and Jeff showed the demo of the Visual Studio tooling with a real time example of using Logic Apps in Visual Studio.

Azure Resource Templates

You can create Azure Resource Templates that get shipped on to Azure Resource Manager.

Azure Resources can be represented and created via programmatic APIs that are available at http://resources.azure.com. This is a pivot to Azure where you are looking at the API version of your resources.

Resource templates define a collection of resources to created

Templates include –

Resources that you want to create

Parameters that you want to pass during deployment (for example)

Variables (specific calculated values)

Outputs

Service Principal

With this, you can get authorization to an application that you create and then say the application has access to the resources.

Jeff wrapped up the session by showing a demo of how the deployment process works, in detail. You can watch the video that will be available in a week’s time on BizTalk360 website for the detailed understanding of the steps to perform a deployment.

With this wrapped up the 1.5 days of sessions from Microsoft on core integration technologies, and what’s coming up from them in the coming months. It was now time for the Integration MVPs to take the stage and show what they’ve done/achieved, or what they can do with the various offerings from Microsoft.

Saravana was given a “warm” welcome with a nice music and a loud applause from the audience! 🙂 Saravana thanked the entire Microsoft team for their presence and effort at INTEGRATE 2017 over the last 1.5 days.

Saravana discussed the challenges with Azure Service Bus and how ServiceBus360 helps to solve the Operations, Monitoring and Analytics issues of Azure Service Bus.

You get ServiceBus360 with a pricing model as low as 15$. We wanted to go with a low cost, high volume model for ServiceBus360. You can also try the product for FREE if you are keen on trying the product. If you are an INTEGRATE 2017 attendee, we have a special offer for you that you cannot afford to miss.

We’ll take you through a quick recap of the post lunch sessions on Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017.

Kent Weare started off his talk about his company and how they are coping up to the business transformation demands from the government and local bodies in Canada. Kent then shows how their company has grown over the years and how much it will mean to them in terms of cost of business transformation. The approach they have taken is by moving towards “Automating Insight, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and BOTS”.

Kent then showed why BOTS are gaining the popularity these days – to Improve Productivity! Bots is something very similar to IMs which users are very familiar with.

Kent wrapped up his session with the following summary for companies to take advantage of the latest technology in store these days.

Session 7 – Empowering the business using Logic Apps by Steef-Jan Wiggers

After Kent Weare, Steef-Jan Wiggers took over the stage to talk about Empowering the business using Logic Apps. This talk from Steef-Jan Wiggers was more from the end user/consumer perspective of using Logic Apps.

Steef took a business case of a company called “Cloud First” that wanted to move to the cloud (and chose Azure). All his talk in this session was focussed towards this company who wanted to migrate to cloud with minimal customization and by having a unified landscape. Steef also showed some sentiment around the developer experience with Logic App.

Steef showed a demo that calculates the sentiment of #Integrate2017 (which is exactly something similar folks at BizTalk360 also have tried and reproduced in the Day 1 Recap blog).

After the end of the demo, Steef talked about the Business Value of Logic Apps –

Sam spoke about Azure IoT Edge, the required hardware for Azure IoT Edge and more about flexible business rules for IoT solutions.

Mikael Hakansson started off his IoT talk from where Sam Vanhoutte left the speech, but there came the fun part of the session. Sandro Pereira had to stop Mikael from delivering his presentation and make him wear the “Green” color shirt for losing a bet (well not sure if Mikael was a part of that bet at all and his friends unanimously agreed he lost the bet 🙂 )in a football match. (so did Steef-Jan Wiggers and he was wearing a green shirt too!)

Mikael started off his talk about IoT === Integration and he introduced the concept of Microsoft Azure IoT Hub in detail.

Stand-alone service or as one of the services used in the new Azure IoT Suite

With Azure IoT Hub, you can connect your devices to Azure:

Millions of simultaneously connected devices

Per-device authentication

High throughput data ingestion

Variety of communication patterns

Reliable command and control

Mikael gave a very cool demo on IoT with Azure Functions in his usual, calm way of coding while on stage. We recommend you to watch the video to see the effort that has gone behind to prepare for the demo and actually be able to code while presenting the session.

End of the Sessions

At the end of the session, it was curtains down on what promised to be another spectacular day of sessions at INTEGRATE 2017. The team gathered for a lovely photo shoot courtesy photographer Tariq Sheikh.

With that, we would like to wrap our exhaustive coverage of Day 2 proceedings at INTEGRATE 2017 and here are the pictures from Day 2. Stay tuned for the updates from Day 3. Until then Goodnight from London!

Author: Sriram Hariharan

Sriram Hariharan is the Senior Technical and Content Writer at BizTalk360. He has over 9 years of experience working as documentation specialist for different products and domains. Writing is his passion and he believes in the following quote - “As wings are for an aircraft, a technical document is for a product — be it a product document, user guide, or release notes”.
View all posts by Sriram Hariharan